Taking care of business: Meet the bomb-disposal experts

Captain Richard McCarthy lumbers forwards, completely encased in 80lb of Kevlar and ballistic plates, breathing battery-pumped air in a helmet that restricts his vision as he approaches the stolen silver Peugeot parked outside Heathrow. Painstakingly, he begins to examine the vehicle. Opening the boot, he finds what the police feared most: four mortar bombs primed to cause devastation.

A short while later the 26-year-old officer has saved the busiest airport in Britain from terrorist attack; or to be more accurate, he has just passed his six-monthly licensing test as a joint-service bomb-disposal operator – just one small step in the arduous marathon of examinations towards becoming one of the army’s “high-threat” officers.

The word elite is overused in praise of many military units, but it appears justified when referring to the high-threat operators of 11 EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) k Regiment, Royal Logistics Corps – the men and women who make the “long and lonely” walk to dismantle bombs.

The devices can be anything from a firework with nails created by teens intent on blowing up a phone box, to the command-wire bomb found in Northern Ireland a couple of years ago that contained three chemical barrels with 250kg of explosives – enough to obliterate anything within a 30 metre radius

for negligence after stepping on a landmine resulting in an immediate below the knee amputation in an area previously cleared by and certified clear of landmines by Ronco Consulting.

The United Nations board of inquiry found that Ronco failed to find the mine that injured Mr Fartham as well as three other mines.

The complaint states that Ronco Consulting, acting through it’s agents and/or employee’s, breached it’s professional duty of care to Fantham and did not exercise the reasonable care and skill expected of professional mine clearance companies.